Background

According to his CEI bio, Horner received his law degree from Washington University in St. Louis.

Climate expertise unclear

It is unclear what expertise Mr. Horner has acquired that makes him more qualified to assess climate science than 97% of actively publishing climate scientists.

CEI duties

Horner is a practicing attorney, and at CEI "oversees petitions and litigation on topics including data access and quality laws, the Freedom of Information Act, and government science and agency statutory compliance, and other legal matters involving environment and energy issues, international environmental treaties, and climate policy." [4] His CEI duties also include being counsel to the Cooler Heads Coalition, a global warming skeptics group. He "works on a legal and policy level with numerous think tanks and policy organizations throughout the world," according to his profile on the CEI site. [5] Horner is a speaker at the Heartland Institute's Sixth International Conference on Climate Change [6]

Horner has accused NASA's chief climate scientist, James Hansen, of "doctor[ing] temperature data on two occasions in 2001 and once in 2007 in attempts to show an impending climate catastrophe." Horner told Fox News that Hansen has "clearly abused his platform provided to him by the taxpayer, principally by the way he's been exposed of manipulating and revising data with the strange coincidence of him always found on the side of exaggerating the warming." [8]

The inside flap of Horner's book "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism" states that "for decades, environmentalism has been the Left's best excuse for increasing government control over our actions in ways both large and small. It's for Mother Earth! It's for the children! It's for the whales! But until now, the doomsday-scenario environmental scares they've trumped up haven't been large enough to justify the lifestyle restrictions they want to impose. With global warming, however, greenhouse gasbags can argue that auto emissions in Ohio threaten people in Paris, and that only 'global governance' (Jacques Chirac's words) can tackle such problems." [6]

On September 13, 2007, Horner commented on the rapid loss of Arctic sea ice, on Fox News 13. Horner questioned the claim that the opening of the Northwest Passage was new, because the NASA data was based only on the satellite record available since 1972, and noted that Raould Amundsen crossed it in 1905. In fact, Amundsen, the first person in history to cross the passage, picked his way through the ice in a small Norwegian Arctic fishing boat. His route closely hugged the Canadian coast. In contrast sea ice loss is most obvious on the other side of the Arctic Ocean. Since 1979 an area of ice comprising almost half of the Arctic between Siberia and Greenland became open water. [9]

Despite making frequent contributions to Fox News with his expert opinion, neither of his profile pages on the Heartland Institute website nor the Competitive Enterprise Institute website list any scientific qualifications whatsoever[10][11].

Quotations

"[The planet Pluto, which is warming up despite moving away from the sun], is a reminder that no matter where you are climate happens... There will be inevitably and likely imminent claims [by environmentalists] that mankind is also causing Plutonian global warming." [7]